Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani

First of all, Happy 2012 to everyone. Hope you all have a good year ahead.

I have been thinking a lot about the movie "Phir Bhi Hai Hindustani", released 12 years back on Jan. 21st...the subject of the movie is pretty sensitive. Actually there are more than one subject in this movie.

First subject is presented by Ajay and Rhea. Ajay and Rhea, both journalists working for two rival news channels. In the first half of the movie, there is a sense of competition for fame and money between the two which leaves out the passion for their profession. In the second half, their passion for journalism is present quite a bit. Their passion for true journalism by trying their level best to present the truth of Mohan Joshi who is shown as a terrorist which he is not, is what I am talking about. In between that, no Bollywood movie is hardly complete without a romantic angle so naturally both Ajay and Rhea fall in love with each other and their love continues to blossom throughout the movie. Let's move on to the next subject.

Terrorist. In the movie, I had heard this dialogue where someone asks from which country does terrorist Mohan Joshi belong from. Now the meaning of terrorist doesn't mean a hostile person who goes to another country and wrecks havoc. The meaning of terrorist is one that engages in the act of terrorism. This is a stereotype. I'll go off topic and give example of classifying Muslims as terrorists. Summarizing what most media people say is that Muslims go to other countries (non-Muslim countries) and causes harm to the citizens of those countries. But that's not true. Anyway, I won't get into that matter now. But I will say one thing, a terrorist can belong to his/her own country, state/province, town, locality, neighborhood and do life threatening actions. Coming back to the movie, in a particular scene, Mohan Joshi yells out that he is not a terrorist, he killed that political figure because that man had raped Joshi's daughter for which she committed suicide.

Third subject is news channels being politically biased towards political parties. It can be because of money, new channel owner's liking or any other reason although I can't seem to think of any other reason. I will use USA channels as examples, take Fox News, fully Republican. Take CNN, rather neutral but indirectly siding with Democrats. In the movie, the channels have more than political differences but also personal differences between the owners of their respective channels. Kaka Chowdhry (boss of Ajay) used to work under Mr. Chinoy (boss of Rhea) and having faced humiliation while working under Chinoy, he swore to climb the ladder of Chinoy and overthrow Chinoy's business. Towards the end of the movie, their enmity is shown to be over since their respective political parties also end their enmity. To give a name, it's called being puppets of politicians. There is nothing called self respect in both Chinoy and Chowdhry because they are shown to have sold their soul to their political puppet masters.

Anyway, I find these 3 subjects to be the primary ones in the movie. Of course there is the usual Bollywood masala in it (comedy, dance, romance, etc.). There are flaws in the movie but such movie in the year 2000 was definitely commendable. Of course the movie didn't do good business, didn't receive awards or received to good response from critics. In fact, Shah Rukh himself has said it that Juhi, Aziz Mirza and he cried together seeing how much people bashed the movie. Another factor which played to the movie's doom was Hrithik Roshan's Kaho Na Pyar Hai which had released a week earlier, on Jan. 14th of 2000. A new hero, everyone going gaga over it, Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani got over shadowed.

Ask me, the SRK fan, Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani was a far better film than Kaho Na Pyar Hai. Ask the idiotic critic in me, still Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani was more believable as a story and more serious than Kaho Na Pyar Hai.

Anyway, I liked Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani, if the movie had a little less of masala then this could have been one of Shah Rukh's finest performances but he performed well as the arrogant fame hungry journalist. At the end of the movie, he took the role of a leader to lead a huge crowd of Mohan Joshi's supporters and stop Joshi's hanging.